Apparatuses and methods for measuring the audience of a media presentation, such as a television or a radio programme, are well-known in the industry. The knowledge of the size and composition of audiences to television or radio broadcasts transmitted to certain environments, like for example a home, is of paramount importance for the whole broadcast industry in order to rate the advertising space included in broadcasts.
A group of viewers cooperating in television audience surveys is called “panel”, while each viewer participating in the panel is called a “panel member”. An audience metering apparatus (called a “meter”) is associated with each one of a plurality of media rendering devices or display systems used by panel members for watching television broadcasts at respective viewing locations. The metering apparatus has three main goals: a) determining the broadcast content being shown on the associated media rendering device; b) identifying the broadcast source and the distribution platform (e.g., a television channel transmitted over analogue terrestrial, digital terrestrial or analogue satellite platforms, or by means of cable TV, or IPTV, etc.); c) registering the presence of one or more panel members so that the exposure to the broadcast content and platform determined by the metering apparatus can be accounted to produce audience data.
Audience metering systems typically include a set-top box connected to the media rendering device (traditionally a television in the case of media which includes video). In order to identify the viewed broadcast content, these metering systems may use one or many different methods available, such as tuner frequency measurement, detection of embedded video or audio codes, Service Information, image feature recognition, watermarking, and signature generation, amongst others.
In the case of the latter, many systems have been proposed which, essentially, include metering devices that derive signatures continuously or discretely either from the audio or video output (or both simultaneously) of the television or display device, and store the signatures together with an associated time stamp. The stored signatures generated by the metering devices are later transmitted by means of a modem or any other telecommunications means to a remotely located central base, where they are processed in order to identify all broadcast content shown on the monitored television or display device.
This function may be achieved by means of content identification technology which comprises techniques and methods that can recognize an unknown segment of audio or video material among a plurality of reference signatures generated from known audio or video streams. Content identification therefore requires the generation and recognition of reference signatures (also called fingerprints) for the different broadcast sources being monitored. Audio and/or video signals of the broadcast sources are converted into reference signatures that univocally characterize the media content of those signals. A pattern correlation engine is then used to identify an unknown piece of broadcast content by comparing its signatures against the previously-generated reference signatures. The content on display is then determined by analyzing correlation values according to appropriate algorithms in order to provide a wide range of media measurement and monitoring services, of which the most widely used is “Broadcast Identification” (i.e. recognizing a channel being watched on a television).
In recent years the number of television channels available to the public has increased by an order of magnitude (hundreds of channels compared to tens of channels), mainly due to the digitalization of the content distribution platforms, and this trend is set to continue. This phenomenon poses technical, operational and economical challenges to content matching audience measurement systems, especially as the costs related to referencing hundreds or even thousands of channels become prohibitive in terms of space, labor, hardware and other running expenses associated to large scale data processing.
Different solutions have been implemented to lower the impact of the increasing number of references requested, all of them consisting in the inclusion of (or substitution by) a complementary measurement technology as, for example, watermarking, broadcast identification codes (when available), banner reading, etc. However, these technologies either face the same challenges as content matching, or cannot solve all the associated problems. Watermarking, i.e., the insertion of audio or video codes in the signal stream, requires the installation of one encoder for each channel at the broadcaster's premises. In this case, the number of encoders required grows in direct proportion to the number of channels to me measured. Broadcast identification codes are only available for measurement purposes in certain distribution platforms (subscription based satellite and cable services, IPTV) and are inaccessible in a standard format in free distribution platforms, such as open satellite and Digital Terrestrial television, for example. Banner recognition and other solutions based on screen information analysis are highly dependent on the receiving device characteristics, such as aspect ratio, definition, set-top box's on-screen menus, etc.
There is, therefore, a need to solve the cost and technical challenges faced by content matching technologies when the number of broadcast sources to be monitored and measured is a large number, e.g. in the hundreds or even thousands.